Sunday, 19 September 2010

How-To: Install Dillo Web Browser in Ubuntu Maverick Beta

Dillo is a simplistic, minimal web browser built using the FLTK2 (Fast Light Toolkit) library, designed especially for a minimal load on resources. It is used successfully by various distributions out there that aim to stay small and fast (the last time I checked it was included in Damn Small Linux for example).

Dillo 2.2 - the minimalist and fast web browser for Linux

I decided to make a review of Dillo (in the past I reviewed version 2.0 here) but realized that currently Dillo is not included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. So this is why I set out to make first a short how-to on how to install it in Maverick. Considering you will also need to compile and install FLTK2 in order to compile Dillo (because the repositories include FLTK 1.1, but not FLTK 2.0), we will use a DEB package to install it. Just follow the steps below.

Download the DEB package from the Dillo PPA archive (direct link) and save it somewhere on your hard disk. Now open a terminal, make sure the currently working directory is the one where you saved it (use the pwd command to print the working directory) and type:

sudo dpkg -i dillo_2.2-0+dillo1~karmic1_i386.deb

That's it! To start Dillo, press Alt+F2 and type dillo in the run box that appears.